Rabbi Meir Poppers רבי מאיר פאפרש
the hand by which the Ari's writings were sorted and handed on
The Ari wrote almost nothing: the teaching was recorded by students, chiefly Rabbi Chaim Vital, and the records spread in copies, tangled and repeated. A generation later it was clear that without sorting, the teaching would drown in its own copies.
Poppers did that work. He did not compose: he gathered the copies, compared them, separated what was heard from what was transcribed, and laid it all out by subject—what concerns the worlds, what prayer, what the commandments. His arrangement is the eightfold order in which the Ari's Kabbalah is learned to this day; an Etz Chaim on the shelf is, as a rule, his ordering.
Born in Prague, he went up to Jerusalem and died in 1662. The sources give no exact year of birth—we set a window.
Places
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Etz Chaim and Peri Etz Chaim in Poppers's arrangement — the sorting and order of the Ari's writings; learned by it to this day
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — Prague to Jerusalem; died 1662; the sources give no year of birth
Basis: Talmud and midrash.